The Hijackers We Let Escape

The CIA tracked two suspected terrorists to a Qaeda summit
in Malaysia in January 2000, then looked on as they re-entered
America and began preparations for September 11.

Inside
what may be the worst intelligence failure of all. A
NEWSWEEK exclusive

By Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman

June 10 — Kuala Lumpur is an easy choice if you’re
looking to lie low. Clean and modern, with reliable telephones, banks and Internet service, the
Malaysian city is a painless flight from most world capitals—and Muslim visitors don’t need visas
to enter the Islamic country.
THAT MAY EXPLAIN WHY Al Qaeda chose the sprawling metropolis for a secret planning
summit in early January 2000. Tucked away in a posh suburban condominium overlooking a
Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, nearly a dozen of Osama bin Laden’s trusted followers,
posing as tourists, plotted future terrorist strikes against the United States.
At the time, the men had no idea that they were being closely watched—or that the CIA
already knew some of their names. A few days earlier, U.S. intelligence had gotten wind of the
Qaeda gathering. Special Branch, Malaysia’s security service, agreed to follow and photograph
the suspected terrorists. They snapped pictures of the men sightseeing and ducking into
cybercafes to check Arabic Web sites.

What happened next, some U.S. counterterrorism officials say, may be the most puzzling, and
devastating, intelligence failure in the critical months before September 11. A few days after
the Kuala Lumpur meeting, NEWSWEEK has learned, the CIA tracked one of the terrorists, Nawaf
Alhazmi, as he flew from the meeting to Los Angeles. Agents discovered that another of the
men, Khalid Almihdhar, had already obtained a multiple-entry visa that allowed him to enter
and leave the United States as he pleased. (They later learned that he had in fact arrived in the
United States on the same flight as Alhazmi.)

Yet astonishingly, the CIA did nothing with this information. Agency officials didn’t tell the INS,
which could have turned them away at the border, nor did they notify the FBI, which could have
covertly tracked them to find out their mission. Instead, during the year and nine months after
the CIA identified them as terrorists, Alhazmi and Almihdhar lived openly in the United States,
using their real names, obtaining driver’s licenses, opening bank accounts and enrolling in
flight schools—until the morning of September 11, when they walked aboard American Airlines
Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.

CLEAR FAILURE

Until now, the many
questions about intelligence shortcomings leading up to the attacks have focused on the
FBI’s clear failure to connect various vague clues that might have put them on the trail of the
terrorists. Last week, in the aftermath of Minnesota agent Coleen Rowley’s scathing letter
ripping the FBI for ignoring warnings from the field, Director Robert Mueller announced a
series of reforms aimed at modernizing the bureau.

All along, however, the CIA’s
Counterterrorism Center—base camp for the agency’s war on bin Laden—was sitting on
information that could have led federal agents right to the terrorists’ doorstep. Almihdhar
and Alhazmi, parading across America in plain sight, could not have been easier to find.
NEWSWEEK has learned that when Almihdhar’s visa expired, the State Department, not knowing
any better, simply issued him a new one in June 2001—even though by then the CIA had linked
him to one of the suspected bombers of the USS Cole in October 2000. The two terrorists’
frequent meetings with the other September 11 perpetrators could have provided federal
agents with a road map to the entire cast of 9-11 hijackers.

But the FBI didn’t know it was
supposed to be looking for them until three weeks before the strikes, when CIA Director
George Tenet, worried an attack was imminent, ordered agency analysts to review their files. It
was only then, on Aug. 23, 2001, that the agency sent out an all-points bulletin, launching
law-enforcement agents on a frantic and futile search for the two men. Why didn’t the CIA share
its information sooner? “We could have done a lot better, that’s for sure,” one top intelligence
official told NEWSWEEK.

The CIA’s belated and reluctant admission now makes it
impossible to avoid the question that law-enforcement officials have tried to duck for weeks:
could we have stopped them? Tenet has vigorously defended his agency’s performance in the
months before the attacks. In February he told a Senate panel that he was “proud” of the CIA’s
record. He insisted that the terrorist strikes were not due to a “failure of attention, and
discipline, and focus, and consistent effort—and the American people need to understand that.”
Yet last week intelligence officials acknowledged that the agency made at least one mistake:
failing to notify the State Department and the INS, so the men could have been stopped at the
border.

AT A LOSS

CIA officials, who have been preparing for the start of Senate
intelligence committee hearings this week, seem at a loss to explain how this could have
happened. The CIA is usually loath to share information with other government agencies, for
fear of compromising “sources and methods.”

CIA officials also say that at the time
Almihdhar and Alhazmi entered the country in January 2000, they hadn’t yet been identified as
bin Laden terrorists—despite their attendance at the Malaysia meeting. “It wasn’t known for
sure that they were Al Qaeda bad-guy operators,” says one official.

CIA officials also
pointout that FBI agents assigned to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center were at least informed
about the Malaysia meeting and the presence of Almihdhar and Alhazmi at the time it occurred.
But FBI officials protest that they only recently learned about the most crucial piece of
information: that the CIA knew Alhazmi was in the country, and that Almihdhar could enter at
will. “That was unforgivable,” said one senior FBI official. This led to a series of intense and
angry encounters among U.S. officials in the weeks after September 11. At one White House
meeting last fall, Wayne Griffith, a top State Department consular official, was so furious that
his office hadn’t been told about the two men that he blew up at a CIA agent.
(Griffith declined to comment.)

To bolster their case, FBI officials have now prepared a detailed chart showing how agents
could have uncovered the terrorist plot if they had learned about Almihdhar and Alhazmi
sooner, given their frequent contact with at least five of the other hijackers. “There’s no
question we could have tied all 19 hijackers together,” the official said.

GETTING A BREAK

It was old-fashioned interrogation and eavesdropping that first led U.S. intelligence
agents to the Qaeda plotters. In the summer of 1998, only a couple of weeks after bin Laden
operatives truck-bombed two U.S. Embassies in Africa, the FBI got a break: one of the Nairobi
bombers had been caught. Muhammad Rashed Daoud al-Owhali, a young Saudi from a wealthy
family who became a fierce bin Laden loyalist, was supposed to have killed himself in the blast.
Instead, he got out of the truck at the last moment and fled. He was arrested in a seedy Nairobi
hotel, waiting for his compatriots to smuggle him out of the country.

Questioned by the
FBI, al-Owhali made a detailed confession. Among the information he gave agents was the
telephone number of a Qaeda safe house in Yemen, owned by a Yemeni bin Laden loyalist
named Ahmed Al-Hada (who, it turns out, was also Almihdhar’s father-in-law).

U.S.
intelligence began listening in on the telephone line of the Yemen house, described in
government documents as a Qaeda “logistics center,” where terrorist strikes—including the
Africa bombings and later the Cole attack in Yemen—were planned. Operatives around the
world phoned Al-Hada with information, which was then relayed to bin Laden in the Afghan
mountains.

In late December 1999, intercepted conversations on the Yemen phone tipped
off agents to the January 2000 Kuala Lumpur summit, and to the names of at least two of its
participants: Almihdhar and Alhazmi. The condo where the meeting took place was a weekend
getaway owned by Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-educated microbiologist who had become a radical
Islamist and bin Laden follower. He was arrested last December when he returned from
Afghanistan, where he had served as a field medic for the Taliban.

Sufaat’s lawyer says his
client let the men stay at his place because “he believes in allowing his property to be used for
charitable purposes.” But he claims Sufaat had no idea that they were terrorists.

‘THERE
WAS NO SHOW OF CONCERN’

After the meeting, Malaysian intelligence continued to
watch the condo at the CIA’s request, but after a while the agency lost interest. Had agents
kept up the surveillance, they might have observed another beneficiary of Sufaat’s charity:
Zacarias Moussaoui, who stayed there on his way to the United States later that year. The
Malaysians say they were surprised by the CIA’s lack of interest following the Kuala Lumpur
meeting. “We couldn’t fathom it, really,” Rais Yatim, Malaysia’s Legal Affairs minister, told
NEWSWEEK. “There was no show of concern.”

Immediately after the meeting, Alhazmi
boarded a plane to Bangkok, where he met a connecting flight to Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000.
Since the CIA hadn’t told the State Department to put his name on the watch list of suspected
terrorists, or told the INS to be on the lookout for him, he breezed through the airport and into
America. Almihdhar was also on the plane, though CIA agents did not know it at the time.

The CIA is forbidden from spying on people inside the United States. Had it followed standard
procedure and passed the baton to the FBI once they crossed the border, agents would have
discovered that Almihdhar and Alhazmi weren’t just visiting California, they were already living
there. The men had moved into an apartment in San Diego two months before the Kuala
Lumpur meeting.

The CIA’s reluctance to divulge what it knew is especially odd because,
as 2000 dawned, U.S. law-enforcement agencies were on red alert, certain that a bin Laden
strike somewhere in the world could come at any moment. There was certainly reason to
believe bin Laden was sending men here to do grave harm. Just a few weeks before, an alert
Customs inspector had caught another Qaeda terrorist, Ahmed Ressam, as he tried to cross the
Canadian border in a rental car packed with explosives. His mission: to blow up Los Angeles
airport. Perhaps agency officials let down their guard after warnings about a Millennium Eve
attack never materialized. Whatever the reason, Alhazmi and Almihdhar fell off their radar
screen.

FAST FOOD AND STRIP CLUBS

Free to do as they pleased, the 25-year-old
Alhazmi and 26-year-old Almihdhar went about their terrorist training in southern California.
They told people they were buddies from Saudi Arabia hoping to learn English and become
commercial airline pilots. The cleanshaven Alhazmi and Almihdhar played soccer in the park
with other Muslim men and prayed the required five times a day at the area mosque. They
bought season passes to Sea World and dined on fast food, leaving the burger wrappers strewn
around their sparsely furnished apartment. And, despite their religious convictions, the men
frequented area strip clubs. Neighbors found it odd that the men would rarely use the
telephones in their apartment. Instead, they routinely went outside to make calls on mobile
phones.

People who knew the men recall that they couldn’t have been more different.
Alhazmi was outgoing and cheerful, making friends easily. He once posted an ad online
seeking a Mexican mail-order bride, and worked diligently to improve his English. By contrast,
Almihdhar was dark and brooding, and expressed disgust with American culture. One evening,
he chided a Muslim acquaintance for watching “immoral” American television. “If you’re so
religious, why don’t you have facial hair?” the friend shot back. Almihdhar patted him
condescendingly on the knee. “You’ll know someday, brother,” he said.

Neither man lost
sight of the primary mission: learning to fly airplanes. Almihdhar and Alhazmi took their flight
lessons seriously, but they were impossible to teach.

Instructor Rick Garza at Sorbi’s Flying
Club gave both men a half-dozen classes on the ground before taking them up in a
single-engine Cessna in May. “They were only interested in flying big jets,” Garza recalls. But
Garza soon gave up on his hapless students. “I just thought they didn’t have the aptitude,” he
says. “They were like Dumb and Dumber.”

Had law-enforcement agents been looking for
Alhazmi and Almihdhar at the time, they could have easily tracked them through bank records.
In September 2000, Alhazmi opened a $3,000 checking account at a Bank of America branch.
The men also used their real names on driver’s licenses, Social Security cards and credit cards.
When Almihdhar bought a dark blue 1988 Toyota Corolla for $3,000 cash, he registered it in his
name. (He later signed the registration over to Alhazmi, whose name was on the papers when
the car was found at Dulles International Airport on September 11.) Of course, agents might
have used another resource to pinpoint their location: the phone book. Page 13 of the
2000-2001 Pacific Bell White Pages contains a listing for “ALHAZMI Nawaf M 6401 Mount Ada
Rd. 858-279-5919.”

LOST IN THE FILES

By then, though, the case seems to have gotten
lost deep in the CIA’s files. But Almihdhar’s name and face surfaced yet again, in the aftermath
of the October 2000 bombing of the Cole. Within days of the attack, a team of FBI agents flew
to Yemen to investigate. They soon began closing in on suspects. One was a man called Tawfiq
bin Attash, a.k.a. Khallad, a fierce, one-legged Qaeda fighter.

When analysts at the CIA’s
Counterterrorism Center in Langley, Va., pulled out the file on Khallad, they discovered
pictures of him taken at the Kuala Lumpur meeting. In one of the shots, he is standing next to
Almihdhar. If, as the CIA now claims, it wasn’t certain that Almihdhar had terrorist connections,
it certainly knew it now. And yet the agency still did nothing and notified no one.

In mid-
to late 2000, Almihdhar left San Diego for good. It appears that he spent the next several
months bouncing around the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

While he was away, his visa
expired—a potentially big problem. Yet since the CIA was still not sharing information about
Almihdhar’s Qaeda connections, the State Department’s Consular Office in Saudi Arabia simply
rubber-stamped him a new one.

Almihdhar returned to the United States on July 4, 2001,
flying into New York. He spent at least some of the time leading up to September traveling
around the East Coast and, at least once, meeting with Mohamed Atta and other September 11
plotters in Las Vegas.

A TICKET FOR SPEEDING

Meanwhile, Alhazmi, having flunked out
of two California flight schools, decided to try his luck in Phoenix in early 2001. There he
hooked up with another Qaeda terrorist in training, Hani Hanjour, who eventually piloted
Flight 77. In April 2001 Alhazmi headed east, and was pulled over for speeding. Oklahoma
State Trooper C. L. Parkins ran Alhazmi’s California driver’s license through the computer,
checked to see if the car was stolen and made sure there wasn’t a warrant out for Alhazmi’s
arrest. When nothing came up, he issued the terrorist two tickets, totaling $138, and sent him
on his way. (The tickets were not discovered until after 9-11.) Like Almihdhar, Alhazmi
eventually went east, spending time in New Jersey and Maryland. On Aug. 25, he used his credit
card to purchase two tickets for Flight 77.

Two days earlier, CIA officials finally, and
frantically, awoke to their mistake. That summer, as U.S. intelligence picked up repeated signals
that bin Laden was about to launch a major assault, Tenet ordered his staff to scrub the
agency’s files, looking for anything that might help them thwart whatever was coming. It didn’t
take long to discover the file on Almihdhar and Alhazmi. CIA officials checked with the INS, only
to discover that Almihdhar had traveled out of the country, and was allowed back in on his new
visa. On Aug. 23, the CIA sent out an urgent cable, labeled IMMEDIATE, to the State
Department, Customs, INS and FBI, telling them to put the two men on the terrorism watch list.

The FBI began an aggressive, “full field” investigation. Agents searched all nine Marriott
hotels in New York City, the place Almihdhar had listed as his “destination” on his immigration
forms in July. They also searched hotels in Los Angeles, where the two men originally entered
the country back in 1999. But it’s unclear whether agents scoured public records for driver’s
licenses and phone numbers or tried to track plane-ticket purchases. In preparation for their
mission, the men had gone to ground.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT

Now, amid
the escalating blame wars in Washington, federal agents are left to wonder how different things
might have been if they’d started that search nearly two years before. The FBI’s claim that it
could have unraveled the plot by watching Alhazmi and Almihdhar, and connecting the dots
between them and the other terrorists, seems compelling.

The links would not have been
difficult to make: Alhazmi met up with Hanjour, the Flight 77 pilot, in Phoenix in late
2000; six months later, in May 2001, the two men showed up in New Jersey and opened shared
bank accounts with two other plotters, Ahmed Alghamdi and Majed Moqed. The next month,
Alhazmi helped two other hijackers, Salem Alhazmi (his brother) and Abdulaziz Alomari, open
their own bank accounts. Two months after that, in August 2001, the trail would have led to the
plot’s ringleader, Mohamed Atta, who had bought plane tickets for Moqed and Alomari. What’s
more, at least several of the hijackers had traveled to Las Vegas for a meeting in summer 2001,
just weeks before the attacks. “It’s like three degrees of separation,” insists an FBI official.

But would even that have been enough? There’s no doubt that Alhazmi and Almihdhar could
have been stopped from coming into the country if the CIA had shared its information with
other agencies. But then two other hijackers could have been sent to take their place. And
given how little the FBI understood Al Qaeda’s way of operating—and how it managed to
mishandle the key clues it did have—it’s possible that agents could have identified all 19
hijackers and still not figured out what they were up to.

That, one former FBI official
suggests, could have led to the cruelest September 11 scenario of all: “We would have had
the FBI watching them get on the plane in Boston and calling Los Angeles,” he says. ” ‘Could
you pick them up on the other end?’ ”

With Mark Hosenball, Tamara Lipper and Eleanor Clift
in Washington, Andrew Murr and Jamie Reno in San
Diego